Friday, 2 December 2016

A wonderful opportunity to hear what the very first Festival Service of Nine Lessons and Carols might have sounded like from the Choir of Truro Cathedral under their Director, Christopher Gray on a highly recommended release from Regent

A Festival of Nine
Lessons and Carols is the Christmas Eve service held in King's College
Chapel, Cambridge. The Festival was introduced in 1918 to bring a more
imaginative approach to worship. It was first broadcast in 1928 and is now
broadcast to millions of people around the world.

However, the origins of the Festival Service date back to
1880. The Diocese of Truro and the Isles of Scilly was formed on 15 December
1876 from the Archdeaconry of Cornwall in the Diocese of Exeter. The first
bishop of this new diocese was Edward White Benson (1829-1896), later to become
Archbishop of Canterbury.

In 1878 the Royal Cornwall Gazette reported that the choir
of Truro Cathedral would sing a service of carols at 10.00 pm on Christmas Eve.
Two years later, Bishop Benson devised a service with Nine Lessons for use on
Christmas Eve 1880. This first service took place at 10.00 pm on Christmas Eve
in a temporary wooden structure serving as the cathedral whilst a new cathedral
was being built. Over 400 people attended this first service.

A new release from Regent Records www.regent-records.co.uk brings
together on CD and DVD a reconstruction of that first Festival Service of Nine
Lessons and Carols, a documentary on its history and a recording of the 2014
service in Truro Cathedral.

Audio CD (59.23)and DVD 5.0 and stereo (112'13)REGDVD004

The DVD starts
with a recording of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from Truro Cathedral
on 23rd December 2014. This recording is impressive both sonically
and visually. A very fine treble solo opens Once
in Royal David’s City, an effect borrowed from King’s College’s own idea in
later years. There is some impressive singing from the Choir of Truro Cathedral
www.trurocathedral.org.uk/day-to-day/choir.html
under their Director of Music,
Christopher Gray www.trurocathedral.org.uk/music/organists.htm
. The chosen readers reflect a more modern inclusiveness ranging from
representatives of community organisations to clergy.

There is some impressive treble descant singing that rises
over the choir and congregation as well as some very fine individual voices. There
are many of the popular carols one would expect as well as the premiere of a
new carol by Russell Pascoe, The
Salutation Carol, which receives a particularly fine performance in every
way.

The final carol, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, is as
thrilling as any you will hear and the Festival concludes with a thrilling,
incredibly fluent Toccata on Vom Himmel hoch
by Garth Emundson played by Truro’s Assistant Director of Music, Luke Bond

A documentary about
the history of the Service in Truro follows. Presented by conductor Jeremy
Summerly, it is a wonderful and fascinating history of the Festival Service of
Nine Lessons and Carols as well as Truro Cathedral – and much more.

A great deal of research has gone into both the documentary
and the reconstruction of the First Festival Service. We are taken through the
story of the 19th century carol revival, Bishop Benson’s new carol
service and the reconstruction of the first Festival with all the research into
the music as well as mentioning the Father Willis organ that came later in 1887
when the organist was George Robertson Sinclair who later found fame as ‘G.R.S’
in Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

The documentary follows the travel of the Service of Nine
Lessons and Carols via Canterbury, when Benson became Archbishop and then to Kings
College in 1918 where its poignancy was felt after the appalling tragedy of the
First World War. We are given a glimpse of all the care and thought that goes
into the modern Festival Service in Truro that takes place each year on two
nights, the 23rd and 24th of December.

Finally there is Truro
Perspectives where three former Directors of Music, David Briggs, Andrew
Nethsingha, and Robert Sharpe talk about their time at Truro Cathedral and the
development of the choir in more recent years.

The CD brings us
the reconstruction of the very first Festival Service of Nine Lessons and
Carols in 1880 where we are transported back 136 years. The Service opens with
a spoken Our Father and responses;
the First Lesson read by Senior Chorister, James Lansdowne. Each reading is
preceded by a brief Benediction and the readers are chosen, as did Bishop
Benson, in hierarchical order from the most junior to most senior, originally
the Bishop but here the Dean.

In the first carol, The
Lord at first had Adam made, shows this choir’s fine blend of voices and
there are nice touches where the reading reflects the following carol.

There are three pieces from Handel’s Messiah as well as
favourite carols that are heard today before a terrific Hallelujah from Messiah
leads to the Magnificat given in
Anglican chant. After the blessing there is a fine voluntary, the first
movement form Mendelssohn’s Sonata No.3
in A major from organist Luke Bond.

Beautifully produced with a facsimile of the 1880 Nine Lessons and Carols order of
service, this is a wonderful opportunity to hear what the very first Festival
Service might have sounded like. Truro
should be proud of their history, tradition, choir and cathedral. Highly
recommended.

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About The Classical Reviewer

The Classical Reviewer has been involved in music for many years, as a classical record distributor, as a newspaper concert reviewer and writer of articles relating to music as well as reviewing for Harpsichord and Fortepiano magazine.

He assisted in the cataloguing of the scores of the late British composer George Lloyd and has co-authored a memoir of his friendship with the composer.

Having a particular interest in British music, he regularly undertakes talks on Elgar.

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